"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence -- but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher." (Freire 2000, 53.)

"Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me, -- as bits of the world which surround me -- would be "inside" me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me." (Freire 2000, 56.)

"It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world "enters into" the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of information which he of she considers to constitute true knowledge. And since people "receive" the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better 'fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited for the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created and how little they question it." (Freire 2000, 56–57.)

"In my first years of teaching I designed our routes, ordered the intellectual provisions, delivered commanding lectures, and evaluated performance with an impartial hand. In these respects, I also resembled most of my colleagues. I no longer teach in this way. The classroom is no longer my ship; I am no longer its commander. I have shed the traditional vision of individual minds, of the knowing teacher and ignorant student, of teaching as a cause of learning. I find it difficult to think of my actions in the classroom independent from the students I teach, and student performance as issuing from an internal well-spring of intelligence. What takes place in the classroom is our achievement together." (Gergen 2009, 241.)

"To put it in other terms, why should education be preparatory to communal existence rather communal existence determining the contours of education? When one is carrying out responsible practices in the world, books, mathematics, and experiments are not hurdles to be jumped under threat of punishment. Nor are they building blocks for a good life at some point in a distant future. Rather, they serve as resources for ongoing dialogues and their associated practices. To possess books is much like having additional participants in the dialogue. Mathematics for example, would no longer be the odious medicine it is to many, and which they are forced to swallow even when they cannot articulate the sickness for which it is said to be the cure. Rather, mathematical techniques might become the needed tools for advancing a cause - determining significant perturbations in a phenomenon, assessing costs and benefits, reading demographic charts, or effectively communicating the results of one's efforts to others." (Gergen No year, no page number.)

Gergen sees as the primary aim of education "to enhance the potentials for participating in relational processes – from the local to the global," and maintains that "education in a relational key is critical to the global future. Owing to the profound technological transformations of the past century, we confront increasing numbers of people, from differing locales, for differing purposes. Everywhere there is a need for collaboration, teamwork, networks, and negotiation." (Gergen 2009, 243-244.) He then applies this idea into four relational 'circles of participation', those of teacher-student, P2P among students, classroom and community, and classroom and the world:

"Through the Internet, one can connect within seconds to people, images, and sources of information from virtually any nation around the world – and at little if any cost. These developments open up exciting vistas of relationally rich education. No longer are students limited to learning about others, but can begin to learn with them." (Gergen 2009, 267.)

"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational." (Illich 1970.)

Mitra's and Dangwal's findings can be further elaborated by comparing children's self-organising group to the core principles of a study circle. Perhaps the learning results are partly based on the power of co-operation in the group:

"The focus of learning in a study circle is more on the process than product (“the road is made by walking,” perhaps by talking, too) and this process is understood as a collaborative exploration.

The group is more than the sum of its individual members, thus collaboration is power.

The emphasis is on critical learning and understanding substance (reading assignments), not in class performance (empty talking, and opinion making for its own sake).

The aim is a cooperative atmosphere of responsibility in which each member’s work benefits all.

Participants in a study circle are “agents” of their own learning (goal setting, scheduling, etc.). Agency in learning means that participants do not give opinions for nothing but develop expertise and become knowledge creators (see above).

Studying in a study circle corresponds, and is in many ways analogous to, the “real world” learning situations in various formal educational settings, social movements, and workplaces." (Suoranta & Moisio 2006 [1].)

"What and how much can children learn without subject teachers? In an attempt to find a limit to self organized learning, we explored the capacity of 10–14 year old Tamil-speaking children in a remote Indian village to learn basic molecular biology, initially on their own with a Hole-in-the-Wall public computer facility, and later with the help of a mediator without knowledge of this subject. We then compared these learning outcomes with those of similarly-aged children at a nearby average-below average performing state government school who were not fluent in English but were taught this subject and another group of children at a high-performing private school in New Delhi who were fluent in English and had been taught this subject by qualified teachers.We found that the village children who only had access to computers and Internet-based resources in the Hole-in-the-Wall learning stations achieved test scores comparable with those at the local state school and, with the support of the mediator, equal to their peers in the privileged private urban school."

"1. They were allowed to form themselves into groups of about four. 2. Each group has access to its own computer. 3. The pupils were allowed to talk to each other and share information between the other groups. 4. There was no teacher present, only a minimally invasive mediator." (Mitra 2010, 686.)

"The idea of student as producer encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic for the production of knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect to the project of refashioning in fundamental ways the nature of the university, then further attention needs to be paid to the framework by which the student as producer contributes towards mass intellectuality. This requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced. An exemplar alternative organizing principle is already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives which are not intrinsically anti-capital but, fundamentally, ensure the free and creative use of research materials. Initiatives such as Science Commons, Open Knowledge and Open Access, are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or technological restriction (www.opendefinition.org). Through these efforts, the organizing principle is being redressed creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons." (Neary & Winn 2010.)

"For, in truth, there is no ignoramus who does not already know a mass of things, who has not learnt them by herself, by listening and looking around her, by observation and repetition, by being mistaken and correcting her errors. But for the schoolmaster such knowledge is merely an ignoramus's knowledge, knowledge that cannot be ordered in accordance with the ascent from the simplest to the most complex. The ignoramus advances by comparing what she discovers with what she already knows, in line with random encounters but also according to the arithmetical rule, the democratic rule, that makes ignorance a lesser form of knowledge. She is concerned solely with knowing more, with knowing what she did not yet know. What she lacks, what the pupil will always lack, unless she becomes a schoolmistress herself, is knowledge of ignorance – a knowledge of the exact distance separating knowledge from ignorance." (Rancière 2009, 9, italics in original)

"Vygotsky argues that teaching begins from the student’s experience in a particular social context. Pushing that notion to the extreme of its radical logic, he suggests
that the social context must be arranged by the teacher so that the student teaches themselves: ‘Education should be structured so that it is not the student that is educated, but that the student educates himself’ or, in other words, ‘...the real secret of education lies in not teaching’ (Vygotsky, 1997)" (...) "The learning and development approach insists that for students to acquire knowledge, the intellectual function of learning must be associated with practical tasks. For Vygotsky, the ways in which the students are taught by listening to lectures mirrors the alienating labour process of the capitalist factory. Lecturing, for Vygotsky, is not teaching ‘ in setting forth ready-prepared bits and pieces of knowledge … he has ceased being a teacher’ (Vygotsky, 1997)."
(sit. http://learningexchange.westminster.ac.uk/index.php/lej/article/viewFile/15/13)

"We will contrast the trialogical framework with prevailing monological (cognitive) and dialogical (situated cognition) approaches. Five characteristics of a trialogical approach to learning and cognition are distinguished: it 1) concentrates on processes which aim at developing shared objects; 2) takes place across long timescales, 3) involves interaction between individual and collective processes, 4) relies on cross- fertilization of knowledge practices, 5) relies on collaborative technologies designed to elicit object-oriented activities, and 6) develops through transformations and reflections across forms of knowledge."

"While Malcolm Knowles (Knowles 1970) contributed greatly to our understanding of the limitations of pedagogy when it came to adult learning by defining andragogy, we thought that andragogy did not go far enough. Any examination of learning experiences and curricula designed around andragogical principles certainly demonstrated the capacity for linking into the adult experience and recognised the advantages of self-directed learning. However, curricula were still very much teacher-centric with little opportunity for any real involvement at a micro or even macro level by the learner. So, over a bottle of a nice crisp white wine one cold Canberra evening, Chris and I described the notion of self-determined learning that best described an extension to pedagogy and andragogy. Chris eventually came up with the term heutagogy, which is derived from the ancient Greek for ‘self’ with some adjustments and the ‘agogy’ added. Heutagogy is concerned with learner-centred learning that sees the learner as the major agent in their own learning, which occurs as a result of personal experiences." Hase, Stewart; Kenyon, Chris, "Heutagogy: A Child of Complexity Theory", Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, Volume 4 (2007), Number 1, pp. 111–118.